The Sirens’ Call & Careless People - June & July 2025
Let's pay attention.
Hi, and welcome to Book Therapy Project on Substack! For those of you who are used to seeing these invites via regular mail, I hope this is an improved experience for you. Details for the next two book club meet-ups are below. Note that if you want to attend both, you’ll need to RSVP via two separate links. I hope you’ll join for one or both of these gatherings!
Earlier this year, two months apart, appeared two books that immediately caught my attention – The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource and Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism.
Both books appeared to be in conversation with each other, with Sirens focusing on how our attention has been fractured by tech, and Careless People focusing on the people behind the tech.
I hope you’ll join me to read and discuss either or both of these books, in Book Therapy Project’s very first “two-fer”. We’ll focus on Sirens in June, and Careless People in July.
The Sirens’ Call – Wednesday, June 18
“We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory.
“Now, as Chris Hayes writes, ‘With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.’ Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.”
Book: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource
Article: The Attention Crisis is Just a Distraction (New Yorker)
Podcast: Chris Hayes in Conversation with Kate Shaw (Free Library of Philadelphia)
To sign up for Sirens on June 18, please click here.
Careless People – Thursday, July 17
“Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to ‘lean in.’
“Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.”
Book: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism
Article: NYT Book Review
Podcast: Glamorous Trash